Hawaii - James Michener [249]
Concerning only one thing did the Chars have no fear. During their absence their house would be inviolate. Highwaymen might murder them along the road. Slave buyers in cities might try to filch their daughters. Possibly, soldiers would wipe out all the wandering families in a general massacre. And corrupt officials might trick any family into slavery. But no one in China would break into a house that had been sealed with mud and across whose door sticks had been crossed, for even an idiot knew that unless the house was there when the travelers returned, and unless the seed grain was secure, life itself--and not only that of the family in question-- would perish. So while the Chars wandered across northern China, seeking almost hopelessly for food, their house stood sacrosanct.
In the autumn of 856 in a city on the northern borders of Hunan, farmer Char was bitterly tempted. There the rains had been good and the crops were fine. For several weeks Char and his family went out to the harvested fields at night and crawled across them, on hands and knees, smelling out lost grains that even the insects had missed, and in this cruel way they had uncovered just enough hidden morsels to stay alive. Nyuk Moi cooked the gleanings with a kind of aerated mud, some grass, and a bird that had not been dead too long. The resulting dish was not too bad.
But when a spell of four successive days passed with no gleanings to be found and when no birds died, at least not within reach of the starving family, the servant of a rich man came to the tree where the Chars were sleeping, and he carried in a bag a bundle of freshly baked cakes, whose aroma drove the smaller Char children mad with hunger, for they were the kind of cakes Nyuk Moi had often baked, and the servant said bluntly, "My master would consider buying your oldest daughter."
Char, at the point of starvation, found himself asking seriously, "Would he keep her for, his own?"
"Perhaps for a time," the servant said, rustling his package. "But sooner or later he sends most of the girls on to the city." "How much would he give us?" Char asked pitifully. The servant grew expansive and said, "Cakes, enough grain to live on till the spring."
"Come back in an hour," Char said, and as the man disappeared, swinging his tempting bundle of aromatic cakes, Char assembled his family, saying frankly, "The owner of the fields has offered to buy Siu Lan."
Nyuk Moi, who had foreseen that this must soon happen, drew her quiet child to her and, placing the girl on the ground between her bony knees, asked, "Is there no other way?"
"The gleanings are no more," Char said despondently. "Winter comes soon. This time we'll be lucky if we get home with any children."
Nyuk Moi did not rail at her husband, for she knew of no alternative to propose, not even one, and the family had about agreed to sell Siu Lan, Beautiful Orchid, when they heard a whistling, and some stranger was whistling a song long familiar in their village and not known much elsewhere. "Who's out there?" Char cried.
The stranger, recognizing his village's accent, shouted, "General Ching!" And in a moment he hurried up, square-faced, sallow with hunger, but as ebullient as ever. "How goes the famine with you?" he asked boisterously. "With me not so good."
Char said sadly and without explanation, "We are meeting to decide about selling our oldest daughter, Siu Lan."
"I'd buy her!" General Ching cried, bowing gallantly to the frightened girl. "Anybody'd buy her!"
"The rich man's servant is coming back within the hour to